1. Field of the Invention
The present disclosure generally relates to a digital pass.
2. Related Art
Although online (or web-based) purchasing has gained popularity in recent years, certain shortcomings have hampered the growth of the web-based economy from its inception. For example, consumers are currently required to provide a variety of personal information to any merchant from which they wish to purchase a good or service. However, consumers are frequently reluctant to share personal information with unknown or vaguely known merchants. Further, consumers must trust that the merchant's website sufficiently encrypts the required personal information before passing it over the internet to the merchant's payment processing system. Further still, assuming a consumer is willing to accept these risks, the consumer is required (each time the consumer makes a purchase) to enter his personal information. Thus, a consumer's risk of fraud and identity theft increases in proportion to the number of online transactions in which a consumer participates. By some estimates, these factors encourage 25% (Forrester Research) to 75% (shop.org) of consumers to drop out of the purchasing process at the point of checkout.
In addition to these problems, a great wealth of information is lost each day. For instance, the large variety of merchant websites makes it difficult, if not impossible, to aggregate data about which products and services a consumer likes. Indeed, merchants often regard such data as proprietary. Although consumers might benefit from insights based upon their purchasing habits, currently these insights are isolated between merchants.
Several prior art systems have attempted to solve one or more of these problems. For example, Google has developed Google checkout, a tool with which an individual completing a purchase online may trust Google to process a transaction. Google may transfer payment to the appropriate merchant. Similarly, Amazon has developed a 1-click ordering tool that permits an Amazon customer to make purchases online with a single button click. Amazon 1-click ordering is limited to Amazon customers. With respect to the loss of data resulting from disparate merchant systems, certain data aggregators (e.g., RapLeaf) have attempted to target marketing to consumers based upon social networking information associated with each consumer. Likewise, Facebook offers a variety of social plugins (e.g., a login button) which merchant developers may add to their websites, and which consumers having Facebook accounts may use to login from a merchant's website.
Although a variety of solutions or partial solutions have been developed in response to some of the problems described above, consumers are still unable to make purchases online in a relaxed and effortless manner. Further, many merchants are reluctant to hand over data about their customers' purchasing habits and interests to a third party (e.g., Google), as doing so may hamper their ability to target marketing and offer discounts to their loyal customers. Thus, what is needed is a system with which consumers may safely and quickly conduct online transactions and which merchants are encouraged to adopt and support.